What Can $700 Billion Buy?

My students have asked me to help them understand how much money $700 billion is in response to this week's news about the U.S. Government bailout of Wall Street investment firms.

We decided to do a little math class assignment. Each student chose one item and calculated how many of these items one could purchase for seven hundred billion dollars.

I'm proud of the range and scope of responses by my 6th graders. Some items they chose reflected interests of average school kids while others looked at it with a national and even global perspective. The items ranged from cell phones and Disneyland tickets to agricultural equipment and cars.

One way to look at $700,000,000,000 is that when divided amongst persons living in the United States it would be enough to give each man, woman and child $2,300! That's a lot of money.

The final step of the assignment was to pool together all the numbers and build this website together in class. Making the website and the chart helped us all understand how much money $700 billion really is. Pay attention to the numbers column on the left. The range of values is too wide to represent in a simple bar chart like this.

Ms. Decker

Ohio, September 2008